Johnnie Dawson was a catcher in professional baseball in the 1930s and 1940s, and he was from rural Caddo Parish who became, for a time, a Shreveport resident.
Or maybe his name is Johnny Dawson. We're not sure which spelling is correct.
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| Reno newspaper July 25, 1941 (clipping provided by Dr. Margaret Gripshover) |
It was an avid baseball researcher who found Dawson for us and identified him as a Negro Leagues player.
Dr. Margaret M. Gripshover -- whose informal name is Peggy -- is a professor of geography at Western Kentucky University. That field also includes environmental studies.
Originally from Cincinnati, she has been at Western Kentucky for 11 years after previous faculty stops at Marshall University and the University of Tennessee.
So geography is her j-o-b. But she's also passionate about -- and has researched and written on -- horses, the thoroughbred racing industry, mules (yes, mules) ... and baseball.
Pertaining to the great game, she is partial to the Chicago Cubs and the Wrigley Field area, and her current project -- which brings her to us and Mr. Dawson -- is research on African American contributions to baseball.
She is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) and is contributing a chapter on Dawson to a book on the 1942 Kanas City Monarchs, a combined writing project for numerous SABR members.
So Dawson was a missing piece and, having seen some of our work online, she wrote us seeking what information we had on him. Which was ... none.
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Here is what we did find on Dawson from a, well, sometimes-not-sure source, Wikipedia:
Johnnie Dawson (November 8, 1914 – August 6, 1984) was an American Negro league catcher between 1938 and 1942.
A native of Shreveport, Louisiana, Dawson made his Negro leagues debut in 1938 with the Kansas City Monarchs and played with the Chicago American Giants and Memphis Red Sox in 1940. He returned to the Monarchs during their 1942 Negro World Series championship season. It was Dawson's final season in baseball. He died in Los Angeles, California, in 1984, at age 69.
Negro league baseball debut — 1938, for the Kansas City Monarchs
Last appearance — 1942, for the Kansas City Monarchs
Teams — Kansas City Monarchs (1938); Chicago American Giants (1940); Memphis Red
Sox (1940); Birmingham Black Barons (1942); Kansas City Monarchs (1942)
And from the Baseball Reference web site, here is a link to the scant Negro Leagues statistics on Dawson:
https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=dawson003joh
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Going to let Dr. Gripshover -- "Peggy" -- take it from here. Following are parts of what she wrote to us in mid-October:
"Dawson’s baseball career mirrors that of many second-string players in the Negro Leagues of his day. His life off the field was no walk in the park either. I am pretty sure that it wasn’t easy to be an African American man in “Bloody Caddo.”
Dawson’s immediate family was fractured and unstable from the get-go. He and his brother (Kemp Dawson) were raised in rural Caddo by different sets of aunts and uncles in the Greenwood and Flournoy communities. His father, also named John Dawson, vanished from the picture by 1920 and his mother remarried and moved to Shreveport.
Johnny and Kemp had their scrapes with the law in Shreveport, but nothing major (mostly gambling). Kemp left Shreveport before Johnny did and moved to Los Angeles where he had a brief career as a boxer.
The Dawson boys were just two of the many African Americans who left Shreveport for LA during the “Second Great Migration.” One article I read claimed that there were so many former Shreveport residents in LA, that there was a neighborhood that was informally called “Little Shreveport.”
Johnny ended up in LA after his service in World War II. Dawson continued to play baseball in the burgeoning post-WWII semipro leagues in California, along with some other former Negro League players. He played semipro baseball for a variety of teams until around 1949.
After that, I lose track of Johnny and his brother Kemp until their deaths in the 1980s. Kemp died in San Francisco in 1983, and Johnny passed away a year later in LA. I have a few documents that indicate that both brothers were probably married at least once (maybe twice), but no records of any known children.
I am fairly experienced with doing African American genealogy, but the Dawson family has been a real challenge. Endlessly interesting, but a challenge nonetheless.
… There were a few bright spots in the Dawson family story. The uncles who raised the Dawson brothers were fairly successful farmers in Caddo Parish, and one of the uncles was a regular exhibitor (and winner) at the Louisiana State Fair in the 1910s. Fast forward to the 1990s, and you will find Johnny’s cousin, Matel “Mat” Dawson (1921-2002), a Detroit autoworker turned philanthropist who endowed a scholarship at LSU-Shreveport."
From Jim Pruett: 👍 Very interesting. Yes, I too have a couple of “what it was like to be Black back-in-the-day.” As you said, kind of sad. Thanks for the coverage.
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